


Hunger

by HassouToby



Category: Devilman (Anime & Manga), Devilman Crybaby - Fandom
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-14
Updated: 2018-02-14
Packaged: 2019-03-18 04:02:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13673868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HassouToby/pseuds/HassouToby
Summary: The wheel turns. The taste is bitter.





	Hunger

**Author's Note:**

> I drink the poison  
> I drink the poison  
> And I'm still laughin  
> \- Denis Johnson, "Tree of Smoke"

At first Akira eats with his hands, snatching up the roasts and fowl Ryo prepares and tearing into them with such vigor that gobbets of claggy matter spray across the table, sucking scraps of stray meat out from under his fingernails and licking the plates clean. The room smells like a handful of coins as he takes second helpings; the tablecloths resemble animal skins themselves, something scraped from an abattoir, lashed with rivulets of juice and flesh. But after a week or so he insists on knife and fork, even though his upper lip sometimes lifts and trembles like a stray dog’s at the fine mist of blood and scent from the steaks he cuts.

“It’s the Makimuras,” he explains, unprompted. “I still have to eat with them too, after all. Don’t want my table manners to disappear completely.”

“I see.” Ryo’s own small steak and side salad lay untouched, gently congealing. Behind him the cityscape twinkles in radioactive colors. His apartment is white on white and seems to bleed the color from whatever foreign material enters it; if he stood in the center of this room and closed those ice-blue eyes he might vanish. The ventilators hum incessantly. The air they pump out is faintly acrid.

“It’s getting easier, anyway.” Akira spears a chunk of beef the size of a baby’s fist and chews twice before swallowing. “For a while I was always so hungry my teeth itched.”

“Have you ever contemplated eating humans?”

Ryo isn’t sure why, but Akira doesn’t take that well – he lurches forward, nearly choking on his food, and when he looks up those newly-angular eyes are reddened and rimmed with wet.

“That’s…I’d never…” His voice starts to tremble. “Why would you even think that?”

“It’s merely an observation gained from my research of demons thus far. You saw it yourself at the Sabbath. A demon’s instincts are quite well-developed compared to that of your average human. It tends to overwhelm the host’s sense of reason. You have not succumbed to the demon’s influence, but those urges may still be present.”

“They’re not. Not ever.”

“Hmm. That must mean you’ve subsumed Amon’s will entirely. Very impressive.” He plucks a cherry tomato from his plate and holds it between thumb and forefinger, bright as a bloodstone. “We should continue to keep you well-fed here, nevertheless.”

“Yeah, well, I could go for seconds.” He glances at his ravaged plates. “Or thirds. Fourths? I lost count.”

“I’ll call for Jenny. She’ll bring up more food.”

“You need to eat too, Ryo. Seriously, I don’t think I’ve seen you take a single bite.”

“I don't have much of an appetite.” He pops the tomato in his mouth and bites down; it tastes of very little. The acid lingers on his tongue like static.

Akira puts his head to one side. “So, if demons really did exist a long time ago, what did _they_ eat? Seems like the whole rainforest wouldn’t have had enough for them to chow down on.”

“Professor Fikira hypothesized that they devoured each other, mostly. An unabated frenzy of consumption.” His voice is impassive. “It must have been quite the sight.”

“Is that why they went extinct? Just ran out of food?”

“I don’t believe so. They had certain…biological quirks to ensure survival. And their population disappeared quite rapidly. Far too quickly to account for simple habitat destruction.” He gazes out the window; this high above the city light pollution is minimal, and the stars’ jagged patterns are almost menacing in their clarity. “No one knows for certain why they went extinct. The Professor’s notes surmise that God struck them down.”

“Seriously? I mean, I’d believe anything at this point, but…”

“That’s what I read. But this appeared near the end of his writings. The man had gone quite insane by then.”

“Ryo, do you believe in God?”

Something happens to Ryo as the question settles into his skin. Akira sees it – a complicated grimace, like the passing of bad weather. He leans forward, concerned, about to ask him what’s wrong. But Ryo turns to him, and then it’s already gone.

“Eat, Akira.” He smiles. “There’s plenty more where that came from.”

*             *             *

The TV in the Makimura house babbles and squawks. It’s just Taro and his father tonight and neither of them are paying it much attention; Noel reads while Taro plays with his phone, draped on the arm of the couch like a wet rag. It’s some sort of nature documentary and eventually the two of them start talking about snakes.

“What I don’t get is,” Taro says, “why did God get so mad at Adam and Even and the snake in the first place?”

“Well, in the Garden the two of them didn’t want for anything. They knew neither hunger nor thirst. All they had to do was not eat from one particular tree. But then the snake came and-”

“I know _that_ ,” Taro groans. “But what I don’t _get_ is, if God knows everything, then why’d He go and punish ‘em all for something He knew they were gonna do anyway?”

Noel looks up from his book. Taro continues to jab at his phone. He doesn’t appear to have given the question much thought.

“That’s a very good point,” he says. “People are still figuring it out, in fact.”

“It’s been like a million years. If they haven’t figured it out yet they’re _never_ gonna figure it out.”

“Haha. Maybe.”

Taro lowers the phone and his gaze nails Noel to his seat. “So what do you think, Dad?”

Noel fidgets. The problem with children Taro’s age, he thinks, is that you never know what they’ll remember later. Any error their parents make might be forgotten by dinnertime or it might haunt them to the grave. He settles for vagueness.

“I can’t guess at God’s reasons. You'd probably go crazy trying. I just believe that He loves us. Everything He does is out of that love. Even if it’s sometimes difficult to understand why.”

Taro grunts and goes back to his phone. Noel sighs, feeling a crisis averted.

The TV talks and talks. Some time later Taro finds himself glued to the screen, watching a track meet turned into a killing pen, Akira’s body distended into a sharptoothed threshing machine of a creature. He is slack-jawed, breathless, overtaken by awe and a pure and childish want so deep it digs at him like a blade. That desire cores him out and in that hole something else enters, and takes root, and begins to fester.

He awakens to find his eyes sunk deep in their sockets and a subtle edge to his teeth. His stomach feels like a twisted rope and he can hear the heartbeats of his sister, his parents, the children on the bus to school. He smells the iron tang of their blood and wipes away drool, fighting back tears, whimpering at the hunger that gnashes through his guts. When his mother is distracted he hears the swift and frantic pulse of the dog nearby, nestled in the corner of the parking lot. The road is abandoned; there are no onlookers. He sees his face reflected in its rheumy brown eyes and nearly recoils in horror at the expression upon it but his hands move of their own accord and he falls to.

Taro cracks the dog’s ribs open like a nutshell and tears out its lungs before it can scream and that wet crunch seems to eject him from himself entirely and all he recalls are the sensations as he pulls it apart and eats, the slickness of its heart as he pulls it out in one shuddering piece and its tongue slurped down like a coppersweet noodle and the molars clinking in the gutter as he spits them out like popcorn kernels, bones cracked and sucked of marrow, muscle tearing, his busy little hands extracting organ after organ and shoving them down his gullet and darting out before his teeth clamp down on them and strip him of his own flesh in their frenzy, and when he hears his mother’s cries the haze clears from his vision and all that remains are stains and sodden scraps of fur and he fights at once the urge to retch and to lick his fingers clean. And still his belly is not full.

There’s no escaping from what he is. Surrounded by terrified heartbeats, smelling the blood through his mother’s cradled arms, the creature he’d been nurturing claws out. Something crippled, cephalopodan. As with the dog he begins to eat before she can scream and he feels her screams inside him, vibrating off the tissues of his maw, and try as he might he can’t spit her out, not even when her struggles slow, not even when her cries turn broken, soothing, as if in her last extremity she has begun to pray for him. Too horrified to finish the meal and too hungry to spit it out he stays there, pursing at her like a loose tooth, and when his father arrives with gun in hand Taro watches him spasm and swear as if begging for mercy from something unseen but he doesn’t think of God or of love or of anything except for the meal and the gun and the bright pure light that will soon erupt from it and finally put everything to an end.

*             *             *

The commencement of the irrevocable. The earth gone to ruin. Humanity thrashes itself to death as Ryo Asuka’s lunatic catechism spews across the airwaves. Kill the dissatisfied ones, he cries, arms held high in a preacher’s parody while the men at his sides sit and smile with their eyes painted into their sockets. Look for the ones that don’t fit in, that want something other than what they have; there you will find the demons.

It’s a good lie, the kind he’s practiced at telling. Truth with just enough omission to turn poisonous. Hunger is the doorway through which demons enter, appetites of all kinds, but that potential exists within all humanity and as their aggression grows the portals within them crack open wider and wider. Their vicious paranoia lashes back and forth across the world and leaves ashes in its wake.

Ryo stands now on a patch of barren ground, arms at his sides, surrounded by the abominable menagerie of demonkind. His face is that of someone pondering a minor but interesting problem; a chess move, maybe. Innumerable pupils roll and dilate in his direction. The demons who possess knees bend them reverently.

His memory still isn’t fully restored; he’d lived a long time, after all, and certain troublesome details still elude him, like trying to grab at fog. He’d been here before, assembling his army, ready to point them at the Divine, but he doesn't know if he’d been this dispassionate about it the first time. Surely the first rebellion had been something worth caring about. Now he feels more like someone following a script, hands and mouth moving as if by reflex alone.

Nor does he quite understand this vague distaste he had for humans. They had to die, obviously; they weren’t of much use to him otherwise. But now he sees the demons slaver and smack their lips, the air rent with the gurgle of their relentless digestion, and thinks there is little difference between them and humanity in any essential sense. Humans were plagued with want; they had been since they’d taken the first bite of fruit under a serpent’s watchful eye. Their appetites spurred them on just as demons’ did. If they lacked anything it was clarity of purpose. Their teeth were not sufficiently sharpened. Too often they pulled back from their hunger as if it burned them. Akira’s knife and fork, ponderously sawing at the meat.

The horizon echoes with distant quakes. The light of bombs oozes across the skies like aurora. Ryo stands thin and pale as a flash of bone in the barbecuing carcass of the world and feels the edge of something unknown in himself. He thinks that if just had a little more time, grasped it completely, he could fit it into the puzzlebox of his memory and identify at last what he was doing here. But the demons grow restless, and humans, those timid and self-denying creatures, still walk upon the raddled earth, and so he raises his arms and speaks: Take them, and eat. Do this in remembrance of me.

*             *             *

“It’s strange.”

The wind is different, now. The skin of the earth no longer held any impediments for it. It coils and curls across the sea and sounds like a chorus in an unknown tongue. It's warm against Ryo’s skin.

“I feel like I’ve changed, after all this time. I’m not who I was before. But still, I keep doing the same thing. Why is that, Akira?”

The sea become amniotic. Gleaming vermilion in oilslick patterns. The sky overhead studded and crazed with moons. The stones around him glow softly in the light of his skin. His wings shiver and twitch. Overhead and barely perceptible, the sky behind the stars seems to lighten. As if the night itself is just a curtain, with something breaking through.

“It’s my fault. It took me too long to realize what I really wanted. Everything I struggled for, all that sacrifice…I think it was for this moment. Together. You and I.” No answer. “Akira, I’m sorry to have caused you so much trouble. But I want you to know something. I never regretted meeting you. I think you made me better. In a way that nothing else ever could. Thank you for that. Thank you. Thank you.”

He closes his hand around Akira’s. The flesh beneath his palm is cold as clay.

“Akira…in the end, did you ever regret that you met me?”

He turns fully then, sees Akira’s broken corpse, the mouth slightly open, the eyes like clouded marbles. His vision doubles and trebles and he gathers that flesh close to him as his own body fails to warm it, and as he weeps the last of the fog falls away and he realizes it at last, the want that he’d denied and that would be forever denied to him, this cold body, this bottomless starvation, and his cries become wails and then senseless howls and he turns his face blindly up to the skies – blindly, so he does not see it, the arrival of the Almighty, the great descent, the ineffable radiance, the wheels within wheels, the expurgation of vanities, the severing of cords and the shattering of bowls, the face of ever-turning judgement, and so the scorched earth and the wine-red sea and his own lament is consumed by an obliterating righteousness that seeks no entreatment and knows no satiation and that will not stop, will not stop, will never, ever stop.

*             *             *

“Ryo, do you believe in God?”

The question catches him off-guard. Akira’s face is disturbingly earnest. He eats another tomato to stall the answer.

“It’s not relevant.” He swallows. “Better to say that I don’t have any use for Him.”

Akira blinks. He appears to expect more.

“Think about it,” Ryo says. “A perfect being, that doesn’t know grief, or pride, or ambition. That never hungers or thirsts. So high above us to be incomprehensible. So how could something like that ever comprehend the rest of us?” He turns and looks out the window, at the rippling pool and the cityscape beyond, his face reflected in black glass. “Such a being could never sympathize with humans. He might even envy them such desires. It’d certainly explain why He hates us.”

He sees his own face contort. He doesn’t know why he said that with such certainty. It emerged from some murky place deep inside him. Akira, too, is confused, and concerned; when Ryo looks back at him his eyes are shining, throat working as if in search of something to say. For a moment, Ryo wants to reassure him. He’s sure that if he figures out why he said it, he could fix this. He almost grasps the reason. But then it’s already gone.

He shakes his head, pushes away his plate.

“Eat, Akira.” He smiles. “There’s plenty more where that came from.”


End file.
